Tag Archives: graduation

I wasn’t going to post anything, but figured I best if I’m using this old fashioned blog (Snapchat what!?) as a sort of a journal. It’s good to make note of milestones… no matter if it may have taken 20 years to reach said milestone… because perseverance counts for something… it just has to said the tortoise to the hare.

I graduated high school in 1997… y’all… put your calendars away… that was 20 damn-fried years ago. By fall of 1997 I enrolled at USU because that’s what all the cool kids were doing… and by cool I really mean non-druggy. High school came easy to me… I’d do a lot of my homework on the bus or 5 minutes before the class started and I’d still get A’s. College, I found was not the same beast. I had to study… and I really didn’t know how to study. I also figured I’d be superwoman my freshman year and on top of having a full-time schedule of classes, to pay for those classes (no scholarships for the Whitmeister despite good grades and ACT score), I also was juggling 3 jobs and had a death wish with a newly-diagnosed diabetes disease. Needless to say, I bombed big time. I got my first D’s and F’s in all my school career. I had too much going on and not enough desire to focus on the betterment part of my life. I faked my way through a few more semesters… got some more poor grades… did less studying… worked 2 jobs (quit 1), and gained approximately 200 pounds in the process. By Spring of 1999 I fizzled out of the USU thing and just worked. A few years later I attended a year+ of Bridgerland Applied Technology College to become a medical transcriptionist, and that’s where I worked for approximately 13 years.

To make a long story even boringer, I realized that if I wanted to see my dream of owning my own place and perhaps a small country in Europe, I’d either have to adopt a rich grandfather, become a mail order bride for rich blind people, or I’d have to finish that dagnabbed degree at USU and give myself a fighting chance. Transcription was also going the way of the dinosaur with technology advancing, so there was double reason to pick option C. By fall of 2012, I’d re-enrolled at USU and started my college career again. I still worked full time, but only 1 job and decided to keep things sane I better just do part-time school with a full-time job. I was determined to not make the same mistakes I had years earlier. To be honest, I was pretty sure I’d fizzle out again after a few semesters and register for that rich grandfather program, but something in me kept going… semester after semester, 6 or 7 credits per semester and a realization that I’d be near geezer status by the time I finally graduated.

I graduated this weekend… pulled my pitiful 2.4 GPA when I fizzled out in early 1999 up to near a 3.8 (that’s including my F’s and D’s as those don’t get erased from your transcript). Life is funny… could this be the time I was meant to finish my long sought after bachelor’s degree… in my late 30s with greying foliage? If you believe that lives are mapped out before we arrive here on Earth, then absolutely. I’m just doing things out of order.

Call me a late bloomer… I’m wayyyy behind all of you cool kids, but finishing something big like this, for this chic who has a closet full of unfinished crafting disasters, is something to pat myself on the back for. Now, if I could only figure out what I want to be when I grow up!? 😛 I’m open to suggestions!

PS – If anyone knows of a really cool job who is looking for a hardworking, responsible to a fault, newly graduated girl named Whitney, I’m at the top of that list.